It's been kind of long, delayed, path to get to this point. As usually, there has been bugs on Hercules, which has prevented me being comfortable releasing this. Don't get me wrong about this, Hercules is amazing piece of software emulating very stable the needed part of real iron.

==============Release state:==============

This is release, but consider it as 'beta' until CentOS-4.2 stage. The reason for this is that i really don't have too much information of it working on real iron. The s390 is tested/built on real iron, but s390x is made purely under Hercules. If you install this on real iron, please send me some info about it to upi@iki.fi, so we'll know by the time of CentOS-4.2 if it's really OK all the way.

========Support:========

CentOS-project doesn't grant you SLA, but it won't charge you money either ,-) The support is 'community driven', so preferred method for asking is using CentOS-project mailing lists at

There is bug/feature on Hercules floating point emulation, which does make some packages internal build checks fail. As i have understood it from Greg Smith (Hercules dev/coder/nice guy), it's the fact that Hercules does use the native FP-unit on mulating hardware and the number of aacuracy bits/used modes sometimes makes high accuracy floating point ops having different results. The built code itself is most propably OK.

Another thing making this 'beta', is that i haven't been able to test the graphical installer. It's yet another bug, which is manifesting itself on the 'time zone selection dialog'. Most propably that graphical map hits something sweet, like this FP-unit feature, while making some math ops. I'd like to hear if this is OK on real iron.

Text mode installation is tested for both archs several times, so it should be working.

s390x does not contain openCryptoki. That would pull in moderate amount of s390 arch stuff, so it's left out. The s390x is clean 64bit build, so only the glibc and glibc-devel included from s390 (those are needed to build for example gcc). Targetting for Hercules users having something to play with, the hardware crypto unit support isn't something one could use anyway.

================About packaging:================

The target for packaking has been 'clean arch for 31bit and 64bit', so the s390x is not even trying to follow what ever the upstream decides to put in from s390-land. The mentioned openCryptoki was dropped and only glibc and glibc-devel is included from s390.

s390 itself is naturally clean 31bit as it is.

=============Availability:=============

CentOS-project does distribute DVD-images only via bittorrent. Torrent templates are available from